American Hospitality

Fire works lit the sky

I had my maiden trip to the US, the land of perfume, in June 2006. The purpose was to visit my brother in LA. But, just before boarding the flight, I was a bit nervous. For, besides visiting my bro, I planned to attend Prem Rawat Maharaj Ji’s [also known as Guru Maharaj and Balayogeshwar, is a native of India, who teaches a meditation practice he calls Knowledge] meetings to be held in and around LA; meet the congregation thereat and have interaction with them.

Raised in a closed and conservative environment and tied to a restrictive cultural stake, I had been an introvert for long … a pants wearing frog living in the well. So, I worried about my shyness … worried about how the Americans, as they belong to a high-strung, no-holds-barred, permissive society, would be disposed to a brawny Asian. I knew it was only my misconception. Nevertheless, it was nagging at my mind all through my journey.

 4^th of July, 2006. America was celebrating her Independence Day. I saw congregations of well-dressed white people standing or sitting in the meadows in a park. Children were screaming with joy and some of them peddling their tiny cycles around the park. A happy, festive mood hung in the air. All necks remained craned to the sky, eyes too riveted on it.

My bro’s family and I were sitting in a lonely meadow shawled with mists. Since we felt the place was not comfortable to watch the fireworks, we shifted ourselves to another place strewn with dried and dead leaves. When the show was about to start, we found we’d missed our car keys in the place where we were sitting minutes back. We rushed to the spot and started googling for them. We got disappointed thinking we would be missing the fireworks if we would search for the damned car keys.

When we were wringing our hands in utter helplessness, I saw an American lady coming to our rescue. She introduced herself as Dorothy Lessing -- may be a Brit American. She said:’Hi, I know what you are searching. Please go watch the fireworks and let me find out your keys.’ She smiled at us and then engaged herself in ‘the operation-search-keys’. We were a bit hesitant and then, at her persistent insistence, moved reluctantly a few yards from the meadow and started watching the grand sky show.

Lit by the fireworks, the sky looked more ominous than ever with a potpourri of colors. Sparks of light traveled across the sky; they suddenly transformed themselves into shapes of lions, tigers, elephants and deer. Then we saw a fully blossomed flower with honeybees swarming it. There were shadows of men and women holding hands; an American flag was found fluttering. Crowds screamed with joy and excitement. We stood mesmerized, unable to take out our eyes from the sky.

After regaling the crowds with their amazing feats of lights, the fireworks came to an end and the sky became grey again. People started leaving the park and the cacophonies of car horns brought us out of our trance.

‘Enjoyed the fireworks,’ Lessing asked us. She stood before us letting out her captivating smile, our car keys in her hand. She didn’t watch the fireworks, but spent her time in tracking down our keys.

‘Sorry, Lessing’, I sputtered as I was intrigued by a sort of guiltiness. ‘It’s because of us you couldn’t watch the fireworks.’

‘Oh, no, she laughed. ‘I can watch the fireworks next year, but you can’t. You’re our guests … going to be here for some time.’

‘What a hospitality,’ I exclaimed, overwhelming with emotions.

 ‘Please say American hospitality’, Lessing laughed again, and in no time disappeared into the crowd.

While the sky still remained calm and grey, I had a lot of fireworks going on in my mind which ultimately burnt out all my misconceptions about US and the citizens. The country now seemed not the land of perfume, but the land of hospitality.

I could still smell the perfume of Lessing’s hospitality.

Image courtesy: Google

Doctor, Heal Thyself

[My childhood memories, both sweet and sour, are many and varied. They still linger in my heart as I cherish them and safe keep them from the onslaughts of Time. One such dramatic and sad experience that stands out still in the vault of my memory is my encounter with a quack. It happened when I was early in my teens.]

Faced with pecuniary hardships, DU [Doctor Uncle, my neighbor], had decades back, discontinued his medical studies and become a doctor … a self-made-pseudo doctor. His working in a clinic as a paramedic gave him the audacity to call him a doctor.

As luck had it, he soon became famous and most sought-after doctor in my area. For, people believed that he had some mystical healing power in him and his mere touch on the patients would cure them of their ailments. However, aunty [DU’s wife] never gave a fig to such beliefs, calling them rubbish and DU a quack.

Though past 50, DU looked smart with his French goatee and neatly groomed hair. [Hair!!! He had only strands and that too at the back of his head, which, with much effort, he had combed it and brought it to the front just to hide his gleaming pate]. I always saw him wearing dhoti in a Diwan-like style, sporting a black coat over his shirt.

Saturn led my dad to take me to DU when I had an earache for days on end. Leaving me to the doctor’s custody, my dad went on his official tour. DU peered into my ear with the help of a flashlight and tweaked it gently. He then became contemplative for a while and said: ‘Only people afflicted with brain tumor will have such unbearable earache.’ I hardly heard what he said as I felt like blasted and blown into pieces. I screamed my head off and my body trembled.

However, DU was cool. He consoled me saying that he could cure all kinds of tumors, both benign and malignant, with his ‘Touch Therapy’, a device he had acquired after a long research. I stood wonder-struck. Later, when I was watching the film Munna Bhai M.B.B.S, an involuntary thought about DU flashed my addled head.

More grueling was the following day. I went into tears and refused when DU asked me to get a tonsure. He then took me to a dingy lab and had me undergone all the medical tests he knew by his books/journals. We also went to an ENT specialist as DU wanted a second opinion on his diagnosis. ‘Hell with his diagnosis; this cad only takes me for a ride,’ I moaned.

The ENT was a baldie, had untrimmed bushes of hair falling on the sides of his head. I was scared of his bushy mustache and pock --marked face. He had a cache of medical instruments displayed on his table. Not allowing me to take a second look at his ‘stockpile’, he lifted up my chin and peered into my ear as DU did before.

To my great shock, the ENT took out a small tong from his cache, shoved it into my ailing ear, twisted it a bit and pulled it away as fast as he could not minding my screams. Gosh, out came with the tong was a bit of a broken pencil, which I recalled I had thrust into my ear a week back. ‘Had been searching this bloody stub for long’, I shouted with joy and tried to release me from the grip of the ENT.

But, he didn’t let me go. He poured some stingy jell into my beleaguered ear and covered it with a big bandage, which ran across my face and covered my left eye too. I felt looking like another Moshe Dayan. ‘Sure, it’s a value-added to my semi-deafness’, I moaned again.

‘Who the nut?’ the ENT snarled at me throwing the pencil bit into the dustbin. ‘Who got you into all those bloody tests when you’re in perfect health?’

‘Doctor Uncle’, I mumbled.

‘Why, did you call me uncle?’ the ENT growled, twirling his mustache. ‘Yes … no’, I sputtered. He looked at me sternly for a moment and then blared out, ‘uh, you mean that old bloke with a black coat. I saw him sneaking out of my room when I was taking the pencil bit from your ear.’

Aghast I stood, cursing DU and calling him names. I didn’t know even today how I escaped from the ENT’s ominous spell.

 I went to the DU’s house again after six months. Aunty was persistently inviting me home as she was outraged over the ordeal I underwent due to her quack husband’s wrong diagnosis. I was puzzled seeing DU sitting on a bench in his room which was once his clinic. He was clean shaven. His pate was more gleaming than ever due to the conspicuous absence of even a few strands of hair. ‘Who robbed his black coat?’ I thought.

 His table too was clean and tidy. There was no trace of medical books/journals. It was now decked up with volumes of Ramayana and Mahabharata. Reading my mind, Aunty said: ‘Easwar, I’ve banned his doctor business; I’ll never allow him to play that game again after what he had done to you.’ She went to the kitchen to brew tea for me.

I smiled triumphantly at DU, but he, the maverick, took a bunch of papers from one of the volumes of Ramayana and showed them to me. No doubt, they were patient’s call sheets tucked away cleverly in between the pages of the two epics. The call sheets hinted DU’s calling on the patients at their homes instead of having them called him at his clinic.

‘A mobile clinic. Tell your dad that he too can call me to your house if you people like,’ DU murmured and smiled at me rather impishly.

And that triggered my running away from his house abruptly without waiting for auntie. I ran home so swiftly and recklessly, which I never did in the past nor would do it in my lifetime.

Look at the Ocean, not at the Waves

We fail to see the Ocean for the Waves

That ‘true love triumphs’, a time-tested belief accepted by the human race from the days of Adam and Eve, still stands tall giving testimony to the power of love. Love has many connotations; many hues and colors like the working of human minds. Well, efforts put in by etymologists to define the term love go flat since it is not defined by words but by one’s feelings and emotions.

But then, our shimmering passions for love only make us look at its pinnacle since most of us are not able to reach it because of varied reasons. ‘Love is God; love is divine; love is bliss and peace; and love is blind too’ are some of the emotional outbursts we indulge in all through our life without experiencing or feeling all the dimensions of love or without our being able to reach its crest.

To many of us, love is the foam crested waves that are lashing at the shore. We always look at the waves only and not at the fathomless depth of an ocean. It is so easy to look into dots and miss the sight of the picture. Our mental vacation is so crude that it happens without our knowing it.  

An ailing, but obstinate child nags her mother for a cup of ice cream and cries her head off when it is denied. Seemingly, the mother has a heart of stone in not yielding to the demand of her child, but truly she is the incarnation of love as she is more concerned with the health of her daughter than her crying for ice cream. A father is too revealing his concern and love for his teenage daughter when he reproaches her for speaking on her cell phone at midnight. Such a father and mother are on the crest of love since they think their mollycoddling of their children may spoil their well-being and safety.

Sometimes, you may see a man, with good physique, standing at a street corner and craving the passers-by for alms. Instead of giving him a few bucks as your counterparts are doing, you may get him a job and make him live decently. Through such an admirable action you show your love for the society. Sure, your noble act makes you reach out to the pinnacle of love where the Angel of Love welcomes you with a curtsy as she is happy with your displaying of a rare gesture and responding to the unexpressed needs of a beggar.

Lee Kuan Yew, the former Prime Minister of Singapore, showed an altogether different dimension of love for his country when he brought forth a host of capital punishments to rein the occurrence of crimes and to make Singapore a heaven of peace and one of the developed nations in Asia. He did this with an iron hand for the well-being of the people.

It is not uncommon in life to see a person make the other suffer. But, if the cause for making others suffer is to see them happy ultimately, then such an action can be called love … love in disguise. Lee Kuan Yew did this to his country and god, too, is doing this to many of us quite often.

There are people with questionable characters who get things done for others by dubious means: from a drunkard by making him tipsier and from a crazy woman by giving her gold and diamonds. This is always done in the name of love. But, love can never be manipulated. It must never be used to make others do what you want. When you love someone, you must never ask them to sacrifice even a part of themselves in the name of love. This form of manipulation contaminates our love for others.

Eventually, love is the name of the relationship we are trying to have with someone who are closer to us. Rather, it’s a sort of fine feelings … an intention to serve the well-being of others, which may, sometimes, get crowned or crucified. Just read what Kahlil Gibran has to say about love:

“When love beckons to you, follow him/ though his ways are hard and steep/and when his wings enfold you, yield to him/though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you/And when you speaks to you, believe him/ though his voice may shatter your dream as the north wind lays waste the garden.”

Image courtesy: Google

Money Speaks

That money talks

I won’t deny.

I heard it once.

It said, ‘Goodbye'

Image courtesy: Google

Poetry: Richard Armour

He Who Laughs, Lasts!

Time had erased and eclipsed almost all my childhood memories, but not those of my uncle. He was tall, emaciated and slightly hunchbacked. He would look distinctive, a tad different with his white dhoti and full-sleeved shirt. He had jet-black wavy hair, but relished keeping it unkempt. A thick pince-nez would always be on the bridge of his nose and he would be seen carrying a black umbrella on his shoulder all through the seasons.

Uncle would talk less, but laugh more at anything and everything, making men and matters objects of humour. While he got his umbrella hung on his shoulders, he was wearing his laughter on his sleeves. But it became grotesque and people grimaced when he laughed at something during sombre situations like funerals. There were occasions when mother had a dig at him for his untimely and out of the box laughter. But, uncle never stopped his laughing; he laughed through life saying, ‘before the assault of laughter nothing can stand.’

Come Diwali, uncle would give me bundles of sparklers, flower pots, chakras and crackers. Once when a misfired cracker burnt my fingers and made a hole in my brand new shirt, mom told me to stay at home. Fortunately, I had an uncle by my side. He rushed home hearing my misadventure with the crackers and laughed loudly at the bandage on my hand. ‘Hey, man,’ he shouted at me. ‘Get into your feet. Buck up. Let’s finish off the remaining crackers’.

‘Do you know why you fall down sometimes?’ uncle asked me once. I blinked and kept mum for a while; for, at the time I had failed in my final exam and uncle got wind of it somehow. ‘You fall down just to get into your feet again,’ uncle said without looking at my face and let out a ringing of laughter. That was the uncle’s trick and I passed in the next year all my exams with flying colors.

Could I say uncle was my friend, philosopher and guide? No, because those clichés, I’m afraid, would not fully explain the bond I had with him. Could I say then that he was my guiding star? No again, for stars appear only at nights unlike uncle who shone on me always and guided me against all the odds of life.

The sun was now sheathing his rays. He couldn’t win the battle with the dusk. Sea breeze began spilling specks of sand on my head. Uncle and I were sitting on the Ramanathapuram seashore. Uncle had his eyes riveted on the series of waves lashing at the shore non-stop.

‘Easwar, you’re going to Mumbai tomorrow and start a new life. Life is going to present you many of its vicissitudes and you should make yourself ready to face its odds’, uncle became a bit serious sans his laughter. ‘Life is like a battlefield. What weapons would you like to wield in the battle, my boy? It should be nothing but laughter and, through it you can conquer the world.’

That was the last time I was destined to be with uncle. I had to move to Mumbai since I got a job there. The time of my parting with uncle came and I cried like a child, holding his hands. Uncle roared with laughter seeing my tear-filled eyes. He said: ‘Why, Easwar. I think I could cultivate an acre of paddy with the water flowing down your cheeks’.

It was over ten years I came to see uncle. The funeral was in the air when I reached his house. I rushed home the moment I heard about uncle’s sudden passing away. ‘A massive heart attack,’ I was told. It took hours for the message to sink in as I felt a knot in my stomach. All my senses refused to believe that my dear uncle was dead and gone.

Uncle was kept in a bier in his room. He was on his usual attire: white dhoti and full sleeved shirt. The pince-nez was on his nose. ‘But, where is the black umbrella?’ I looked around. ‘In his last moments, he was only calling out your name’, one of my relatives told me when people carried uncle to his grave. All eyes were set on me; they expected I would cry my head off at any moment. But, I fortified myself not to cry as uncle never liked my crying.

Funeral rites were carried out as per the agama rules. Uncle was then cremated. I saw billows of smoke rising skyward from his pyre. I looked at the smoke with a sullen face. People crowding around me thought that I would at last cry now. But I didn’t.

Crestfallen, I was now sitting on the Rameswaram seashore; my relatives were about to immerse uncle’s ashes in the sea. I was looking at the swirling waves. But they seemed sulking and hesitant to come and lash at the shore, for they couldn’t see uncle by my side.

The vast green sea, the surging foam crested waves and the cacophonies of people sitting around me reminded me the day, years back, when uncle and I were sitting on the shore, laid back. Uncle was silent, watching the waves intently. He, then, let out a peal of laughter and said: I tried to count the waves that were coming over to the shore and I heard them saying: ‘don’t try to count us, bloke. Counting us is like shaving an egg … a futile task’. He laughed again and a chorus of laughter burst out from the nearby crowd who had heard uncle’s remarks.

 I now started laughing suddenly pointing my fingers to the waves. People around me grimaced by my roar of laughter as it tore into a sombre moment.

But, I laughed again and again to the delight of the waves.

Image courtesy: Google

 ‘

No Time to Stand and Stare

[Lay back on the garden of leisure/hold on to the new-find pleasure/let go off the oppressive stress/ hands and legs you may stretch/switch off the mind/off load your worries/let happiness bloom around you???

My composition abruptly stopped. The adamant pen, giggling at my verbose, refused to move further on the A4 sheet. Hmmm, even a pen knows about a grain form the chaff; knows the worth of a write better than the writer. Thus my attempt to write a prescription for how to live on and how to sing a song of peace through a poem ended in a fiasco. However, W.H. Davies came to my rescue. His poem ‘Leisure’, which I present here, reflects my thoughts of how to walk through the debris of the modern life. Amen.]

What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs

And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,

Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad day light,

Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,

And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can

Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

Image courtesy: Google

Two Musketeers

Banggggg …! I was shuddering to hear a deafening sound and saw the antique clock, a precious link to a glorious lineage, lying in state, shattered in bits and pieces. The two musketeers nonchalantly examined its broken needles. They were at it again … at their chivalry act after twelve long months.

Over beaten and virtually turned upside down, my house now looked like a site after a bomb blast. Freshly painted walls were disfigured overnight. The two little terrorists, making the walls their easels, drew on them a riot of portraits, doodles, cartoons and caricatures—all with pieces of charcoal.

It was Ganesh [my brother’s son] who would always start sowing wild oats. His caricature of Deena [my sister’s daughter]—with a big, swelled head, pigtails and flat nose—would provoke the little Joan of Arc to retaliate with all her feminine power. Ganesh would thus be shown standing in a puddle with a footnote telling us that he used to wet his bed at night and get slapped by his mother.

Let the walls wail in silence for their lost gleam. But, no good was the drawing room, which, to my horror, resembled like a vessel shop having had a herd of elephants for visitors. Contraption at home were either dismantled or displaced. Thus the DVD player took refuge in the kitchen and the Wet Grinder had a new home in the hall.

The book rack looked bare. The kids had since shifted the books in the drawing room and littered them on the floor. Lying down on the heaps of books, Deena would be reading ‘The Oxford Thesaurus’. Not to get beaten by her, Ganesh would immerse himself in the holy ‘Mahabharata’. On his nose was my pince-nez.

Sometimes, there broke out a fierce battle between the kids over trifle matters like, who would watch Pogo on the TV or who would play games in my lappy. What started as a war of words would end in violence; the two would be found either exchanging blows or throwing missiles at each other—missiles like, combs, hair brushes, spoons-- and they would always miss their target and hit either Kala, my wife, or me. At times Kala would broker peace between the two warriors but to no avail.

Gosh! We were in the midst of the summer riots again gleefully sparked off by the kids the moment they came down to our house from their country homes to spend their summer vacation. They were so enterprising and industrious that their no-holds-barred antics always put us on tender hooks for a month or two.

It was on a summer evening, I went berserk. It was now my turn to ransack the house and make it a virtual hell. I had misplaced the fine print of the ‘Blah Blah’, one of my writes, and that made me disoriented. I had to send it to a Weekly magazine and the deadline was fast approaching. The tyrants, as was their wont, had deleted this piece from my Desktop.

Moved by my predicament, Kala too joined my ‘operation-search-blah-blah’. We rummaged through the house not leaving the wardrobe and laundry, but drew blank. Missing out the ‘Blah Blah’ became mystery and I was upset over its sudden disappearance.

A new ‘Blah Blah’ came to life with unbearable birth pangs. I sat through the whole of the night and reconstructed it in the morning. It looked pedestrian; lacked in its original josh. I was then distracted by the tumultuous thunder claps and boisterous laughter coming out of the drawing room. I raced over there, Kala in tow.

I saw half-a-dozen neighborhood children sitting on the floor and clamoring for attention. Deena was standing beside a table stacked with some of my books. She draped herself in a shawl, brandishing a wooden scale at the children to keep them quiet.

‘Deena, why, what the hell is going on here?’ I flared.

‘Easwar, I’m not Deena, but your class Miss. Come and sit here. I’m distributing all your exam papers.’ She shot back, eyes serious, voice commanding.

‘Kala’, Deena turned her head to my wife.

‘Yes, Miss’, Kala spoke respectfully; her hands were submissively folded across her chest.

‘Kala’ Deena now smiled and spoke softly. ‘This is your exam paper. Well done. You got 98 out of 100.’

OMG! That’s my grocery list’, Kala screamed. ‘Been searching for it for days on end.’

‘Shush’, Deena put her finger on her lips. Kala became quiet. She was happy since she got back her grocery list.

Deena stopped me when I tried to move out of the classroom. She told me to get my paper and then go out. I stopped abruptly, smiled sheepishly at her. She then flipped through the pages of a heavy bound dictionary and took out a set of papers.

‘Good heavens.’  I screamed as Kala did a few minutes back. ‘Look. Kala, that’s my ‘Blah Blah’. My eyes gleamed as if I accidentally stumbled upon a long lost treasure trove.

‘Easwar,’ Deena snarled. ‘Your ‘Blah Blah’ is all rubbish; full of grammar mistakes. I’m sorry. You failed in English. You got only 30 out of 100.’ Kala laughed aloud seeing my discomfiture. The whole class looked at me contemptuously. I saw my write was hit with green pencil and disfigured beyond recognition.

The summer had gone and the kids too. My house now falls back to its usual, intriguing silence and somnolence. Though every room remains clean and clutter free, I find sort emptiness and void surrounds them. Kala and I are now waiting for another summer … longing to have the kids in our midst. For, we know only where children gather is there a real chance of fun.